I’m an author, journalist and one of the UK’s social media pioneers. Here I write about publishing, self-publishing and crowdfunding.
I am also the author of Argleton, a novelette about a mysterious town that appears on digital maps but doesn’t exist in reality. I self-published via Kickstarter and Amazon Kindle, and am negotiating my way through the publishing world and exploring new business models for entrepreneurial authors along the way.
As a freelance journalist, I have written about social media and technology for FirstPost.com, The Guardian, CIO Magazine and Computer Weekly.

Scott said that marketing should reward loyalty and drive interactivity, for example you should encourage and reward sharing. He also talked about a cycle of promotion, starting with rumours, then the announcement of an upcoming release, followed by release activity and then re-promotion. I think the latter is important for self-publishers, as most of us have no resources for a big launch so continual promotion is our only option.

Scott advised that you use the announcement of an upcoming launch to remind lapsed fans that you exist and give them a reason to connect with you again, to pick up an old book. On release, add value to fans’ purchase, perhaps through special editions. And with re-promotion, think up ancillary products that can draw attention back to the original.

He also made the very important point that you must drive fans to your own properties, eg your website, your shop. Don’t, he said, cede all control to platforms such as Facebook or Amazon.

Ruth Spencer, marketing manager at Random House, talked about understanding verticals, a concept that’s not at all new in other industries, but is quite new to publishers. She discussed the Dead Good crime fiction marketing campaign, which didn’t just cut cross all Random House divisions, it also brought in other publishers too.

For self-publishers, it’s a bit hard to imagine how verticals help us individually, but there could be a lot of opportunity here for groups of like-minded genre authors to band together and help promote each other’s work.

Pottermore’s Susan Jurevics gave us a checklist of ways to think about the relationship between your offering and your community:

Finally, author and entrepreneur Joanna Penn talked about the lessons learnt from self-publishing, lessons that I think were very relevant indeed to the traditional publishers in the room. Self-publishers, she said, take a lot of risks: They must always be writing new books, but must also have a consumer focus. Discoverability can be focused on either the book, via retailers, algorithms, search, browsing lists, recommendation etc, or the author via email, content, social media, speaking engagements or traditional media. So marketing is not just about generating attention for the book, but the author too.

Having good, strong metadata for your retail listings is essential, but retailers often offer only restrictive categories, so use keywords, which are usually freeform, to provide nuance. Penn also described how to use pricing cleverly, something I’ll cover in more detail in another post. She launches new books at 99p for one week, then puts it up to £2.99. She also makes the use of sale prices, and has set the first book in her series permanently free in order to introduce people to her work. Hopefully, they’ll like the first book enough to buy the others, which are priced at £4.99. Penn also sends out lots of review copies, and runs giveaways on her mailing list, Goodreads, and with book bloggers.

Penn re-emphasised Scott’s point that you need to own your own platform, so own you own mailing list, don’t rely on third party platforms to gather your fans in one spot. Another hand tip for mailing lists: always ask people for their country on sign-up, so that you can market per country because people get annoyed if they’re being told about events that aren’t in their country. Penn makes sure that there’s a call to action at the end of her books: If you don’t ask people to sign up, they won’t.

It was interesting to see a self-publisher in the same room as traditional publishers, not least because Penn had at least as good of a grip on key marketing techniques as the publishers did, if not more so. There is nothing like having real skin in the game!

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This is another timely article, Suw, with some solid points and tips for authors at any stage of their writing career. When it comes to marketing and promotion in the publishing arena, it makes perfect sense to connect with people on a personal level, and thereby build loyalty and readership, rather than just an audience. Learning how to adapt what you already do in order to better connect with people is vitally important to any new venture. The truth is, writers write to connect with readers, not publishers, editors, agents, etc. Using some of Joanna Penn’s suggestions (and other business savvy writers), allows new writers to learn from those who are forging new paths, and spend less time re-inventing the wheel. Thank you for sharing some valuable points and reminders.

Thanks, Debbie! It can be really hard to know where to start and what to prioritise, and Joanna especially does a great job of sharing what she’s learnt and helping others understand where the opportunities lie.

For Indie writers it is even more important to be reachable. We can’t afford the kind of marketing the big 6 (or big 5 now) do for their prime authors so we need to connect primarily with people. My readers find me everywhere, and email me directly, and I reply to everyone. We connect with the readers rather then the ‘professionals’ and readers appreciate this kind of ‘new’ voice from writers.